Tête à Tête Opera Festival: 'invigorating'

Run on love and a shoestring, this opera free-for-all was full of promising
performances

Amiably curated by Bill Bankes-Jones, Tête à Tête’s annual operafree-for-all has decamped this summer from the spartan Riverside Studios and relocated to Central St Martin’s art school, at the heart of the new King’s Cross development.

It’s a good move. The venue offers excellent performance facilities and the foyers were buzzing with the sort of fashionable youth that more mainstream operatic institutions would give their eye-teeth to attract. There was an invigorating sense of ideas being sparked and connections made.

As ever, the programme changes nightly, with the aim of giving as many young hopefuls as possible a chance to air their pet projects - sometimes in a fairly finished state, sometimes as mere sketches on which the ink has still not dried. Durations generally range from ten to forty minutes, and you shouldn’t expect star singers or exotic productions. This is a laboratory for the future, run on love and a shoestring.

I caught three contrasting offerings, all with points of interest or promise. Lucie Treacher’s The Fisherman’s Brides was the most conventional and perhaps least successful - a portrait of a Scottish fishing village of yesteryear, where women bewail the absence of their menfolk and the harshness of their lives.

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Shrouded in swirls of Celtic mist, it seemed too soft-centred as it pitched wistful modal folk-songs against the recorded sound of squawking gulls and bleating sheep. But 19-year old Lucie writes fluently for her twelve-strong ensemble and her vocal lines might make more effect if sung by a less timid cast, the leading member of which sang vilely out of tune.

Calculated to Death is an attempt by Sebastian Laskowski to make an agitprop cantata out of protest against CETA, an international trade agreement which dangerously assumes the right to intrude into our cyber-lives, raising familiar questions about the extent of surveillance and data storage in modern society. But Laskowski’s bluntly energetic minimalist score did the business unpretentiously, as a quartet of singers chanted the more terrifying aspects of such Big Brother grabs on our private lives. It didn’t last long enough to become bludgeoningly tedious, and there was no mistaking the passionate commitment which motivated it.

Most substantial of all, however, was April in the Amazon, a cabaret in which the virtuosic and alluring Loré Lixenberg sang five songs with music by Laurence Osborn and words by Theo Merz. The eponymous April is a romantic spirit travelling the world in search of love and adventure - an excuse for Osborn to weave an exuberantly colourful and emotionally volatile sonic tapestry, in a style distantly influenced by Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The balance between voice and orchestra was weighted too heavily against Merz’s text, but the overall effect was sensually pleasurable.